by Jeffrey Goldberg
[Back in late January, I was putting together the first of the “Odds & Ends” posts I published on Rick On Theater. I had come across “The Playwright in the Age of AI” in The Atlantic online, and I thought it was a provocative piece. The effects and repercussions of artificial intelligence on the arts of theater, particularly playwriting and acting—which had been an important issue in the strikes against film and television producers by the Writers Guild of America (May-September 2023) and SAG-AFTRA (July-November 2023)—were front of mind at that moment.
[It quickly became clear that Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with playwright Ayad Akhtar (b. 1970); actor Robert Downey, Jr. (b. 1965); and stage director Bartlett Sher (b. 1959) was too long to post with other articles, so I put it aside for later use. Well, now is later . . . .
[“The Playwright in the Age of AI” appeared in the print edition of the November 2024 Issue (vol. 40, no. 334, pp. 50-55) of The Atlantic with the above headline. It was previously posted on the Atlantic website on 30 September 2024 with the title “Ayad Akhtar Isn’t Afraid of AI.”]
His new play, McNeal, starring Robert Downey Jr., subverts the idea that artificial intelligence threatens human ingenuity.
Ayad Akhtar’s brilliant new play, McNeal, currently at the Lincoln Center Theater, is transfixing in part because it tracks without flinching the disintegration of a celebrated writer, and in part because Akhtar goes to a place that few writers have visited so effectively—the very near future, in which large language models threaten to undo our self-satisfied understanding of creativity, plagiarism, and originality. And also because Robert Downey Jr., performing onstage for the first time in more than 40 years, perfectly embodies the genius and brokenness of the title character.
[McNeal by playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Ayad Akhtar premièred for a limited run at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, LCT’s Broadway house, from 30 September-24 November 2024 (23 previews and 53 regular performances). The 100-minute, one-act play was directed by Bartlett Sher (pronounced sheer), with scenic design by Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton, costume design by Jennifer Moeller, lighting design by Donald Holder, sound design by Justin Ellington and Beth Lake, and projection design by Barton. The première starred Robert Downey, Jr., as Jacob McNeal in his Broadway début. The text was published in The Atlantic in December 2024 with a foreword by Jeremy Strong (actor known for his method acting style [see The Method – a Review (12 March 2022) and Bombast to Beckett (13 January 2025), both by Kirk Woodward]; b. 1978).
[A large language model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence that can generate human language and perform related tasks. LLMs can perform various language tasks, such as answering questions, summarizing text, translating between languages, and writing content, including creative content such as poems, scripts, and musical pieces.
[Downey made his début on stage in 1983 at the Geva Theatre Center, a regional theater company based in Rochester, New York, in Alms for the Middle Class by Stuart Hample (children's book author, performer, playwright and cartoonist; 1926-2010) for a three-week run (23 February-20 March 1983). His last stage performance before McNeal was in the Off-Broadway musical American Passion with book by Fred Burch, music by Willie Fong Young, and lyrics by Burch and Young, which closed after a single performance at the Joyce Theater on 10 July 1983.]
I’ve been in conversation for quite some time with Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence [a subset of artificial intelligence that produces realistic images, sounds, videos, or text in response to user prompts] and its impact on cognition and creation. He’s one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can’t be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God’s sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he’s used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn’t believe that this should be controversial.
[Disgraced was Akhtar’s first play. The 90-minute, one-act play premièred at the American Theater Company in Chicago from 30 January-11 March 2012 and had its Off-Broadway début in New York City at the Claire Tow Theater, the experimental-theater venue at Lincoln Center, from 22 October-23 December 2012, where it won a 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting. In 2013, Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
[The play’s London première was in the Off-West End Bush Theatre from 22 May-22 June 2014. It opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater on 23 October 2014 and ran 149 regular performances until 1 March 2015, winning a nomination for the Tony for Best Play in 2015. Disgraced has gone on to play at many of the premier regional theaters in the U.S., houses in Canada, and several European theaters (in English).]
In early September, Akhtar, Downey, Bartlett Sher—the Tony Award winner [for Best Direction of a Musical in 2008 for South Pacific at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater; 8 other Best Direction nominations] who directed McNeal—and I met at Downey’s home in New York for what turned out to be an amusing, occasionally frenetic, and sometimes even borderline profound discussion of the play, its origins, the flummoxing issues it raises, and, yes, Avengers: Age of Ultron [2015; produced by Marvel Studios. distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures]. (Oppenheimer [2023; produced and distributed by Universal Pictures], for which Downey won an Academy Award, also came up.) We were joined intermittently by Susan Downey [b. 1973], Robert’s wife (and producing partner), and the person who believed that Akhtar’s play would tempt her husband to return to the stage. The conversation that follows is a condensed and edited version of our sprawling discussion, but I think it captures something about art and AI, and it certainly captures the exceptional qualities of three people, writer, director, and actor, who are operating at the pinnacle of their trade, without fear—perhaps without enough fear—of what is inescapably coming.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Did
you write a play about a writer in the age of AI because you’re trying to
figure out what your future might be?
Ayad Akhtar: We’ve been living in a regime of automated cognition, digital cognition, for a decade and a half. With AI, we’re now seeing a late downstream effect of that, and we think it’s something new, but it’s not. Technology has been transforming us now for quite some time. It’s transforming our neurochemistry. It’s transforming our societies, you know, and it’s making our emotionality within the social space different as well. It’s making us less capable of being bored, less willing to be bored, more willing to be distracted, less interested in reading.
In the midst of all this, what does it mean to be a writer trying to write in the way that I want to write? What would the new technologies mean for writers like Saul Bellow [Canadian-American writer; 1915-2005] or Philip Roth [novelist and short-story writer; 1933-2018], who I adore, and for the richness of their language?
Goldberg: Both of them inform the character of McNeal.
Akhtar: There are many writers inside McNeal—older writers of a certain generation whose work speaks to what is eternal in us as humans, but who maybe don’t speak as much to what is changing around us. I was actually thinking of Wallace Stevens [modernist poet; 1879-1955] in the age of AI at some point—“The Auroras of Autumn” [a long poem written in 1948, published in a 1950 book of the same name with a collection of 31 other poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1951]. That poem is about Stevens eyeing the end of his life by the dazzling, otherworldly light of the northern lights. It’s a poem of extraordinary beauty. In this play, that dazzling display of natural wonder is actually AI. It’s no longer the sublime of nature.
Goldberg: Were you picturing Robert as you wrote this character?
Akhtar: I write to an ideal; it’s not necessarily a person.
Robert Downey Jr.: I feel that me and ideal are synonymous.
Akhtar: Robert’s embodiment of McNeal is in some ways much richer than what I wrote.
Downey: I have a really heavy, heavy allergy to paper. I’m allergic to things written on paper.
Akhtar: As I’ve discovered!
Downey: But the writing was transcendent. The last time that happened, I was reading Oppenheimer.
Goldberg: There’s Oppenheimer in this, but there’s also Age of Ultron, right?
Downey: Actually, I was thinking about that while I was reading this. And I’ll catch you guys up in the aggregate. I’m only ever doing two things: Either I’m trying to avoid threats or I’m seeking opportunities. This one is the latter. And I was thinking, Why would I be reading this? Because, I mean, I’ve been a bit of an oddball, and I was thinking, Why is this happening to me; why is this play with me? And I’m having this reaction, and it took me right back to Paul Bettany [English actor; b. 1971].
So that you guys understand what’s going on, this is the second Avengers film, Age of Ultron, and Bettany was playing this AI, my personal butler. The butler had gone through these iterations, and [the writer and director] [sic] Joss Whedon [b. 1964] decided, “Let’s have you become a sentient being, a sentient being that is created from AI.” So first Bettany is the voice, and then he became this purple creature. And then there was this day when Bettany had to do a kind of soliloquy that Joss had written for him, as we are all introduced to him, wondering, Is he a threat? Can we trust him? Is he going to destroy us? And there comes this moment when we realize that he’s just seeking to understand, and be understood. And this was the moment in the middle of this genre film when we all stopped and thought, Wait, I think we might actually be talking about something important.
Goldberg: Bart, what are you exploring here?
Bartlett Sher: I’m basically exploring the deep tragedy of the life of Jacob McNeal. That’s the central issue. AI and everything around it, these are delivery systems to that exploration.
Akhtar: Robert has this wonderful moment in the play, the way he does it, in which he’s arguing for art in this very complicated conversation with a former lover. And it gets to one of the essences of the play, which is that this is an attempt to defend art even if it’s made by an indefensible person. Because in the end, human creation is still superior, and none of us is perfect. So the larger conversation around who gets to write, the morality of writing, all of that? In a way, it’s kind of emerging from that.
Goldberg: I can’t say for sure, but I think this is the first play that’s simultaneously about AI and #MeToo [a social movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault launched the U.S. in 2006; popularized as a hashtag in 2017].
Downey: And identity and intergenerational conflict and cancel culture and misunderstanding and subintentional contempt and unconscious bias.
Goldberg: Are there any third rails you don’t touch?
Akhtar: McNeal is the third rail. He’s a vision of the artist in opposition to society. Not a flatterer of the current values, but someone who questions them: “That’s a lie. That’s not true.”
Goldberg: The timing is excellent.
Downey: In movies, you always miss the moment, or you are preempted by something. With Oppenheimer, we happened to be coming out right around the time of certain other world events, but we couldn’t have known. With this, we are literally first to market. Theater is the shortest distance between two points. You have something urgent to say, and you don’t dawdle, and you have a space like Lincoln Center that is not interested in the bottom line, but interested in the form. And you have Ayad inspiring Bart, and then you get me, the bronze medalist. But I’m super fucking motivated, because I never get this sense of immediacy and emergence happening in real time.
Goldberg: Let’s talk for a minute about the AI creative apocalypse, or if it’s a creative apocalypse at all. I prompted Claude [family of LLMs developed by Anthropic in 2023] to write a play just like McNeal, with the same plot turns and characters as your play, and I asked it to write it in your style. What emerged was a play called The Plagiarist’s Lament. I went back and forth with Claude for a while, mainly to try to get something less hackish. But in the end, I failed. What came out was something like an Ayad play, except it was bad, not good.
Akhtar: But here’s the thing. You’re just using an off-the-shelf product, not leading-edge story technology that is now becoming increasingly common in certain circles.
Goldberg: So don’t worry about today, but tomorrow?
Akhtar: The technology’s moving quickly, so it’s a reality. And worrying? I’m not trying to predict the future. And I’m also certainly not making a claim about whether it’s good or bad. I just want to understand it, because it’s coming.
Downey: To borrow from recent experience, I think we may be at a post-Trinity [first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted in New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project on 16 July 1945], pre-Hiroshima [6 August 1945], pre-Nagasaki [9 August 1945] moment, though some people would say that we’re just at Hiroshima.
Goldberg: Hiroshima being the first real-world use of ChatGPT [popular computer program, based on an LLM and launched by OpenAI in 2022, that holds conversations through a chat room]?
Downey: Trinity showed us that the bomb was purpose-built, and Hiroshima was showing us that the purpose was, possibly, not entirely necessary, but that it also didn’t matter, because, historically, it had already happened.
Goldberg: Right now, I’m assuming that part of the problem I had with the LLM was that I was giving it bad prompts.
Downey: One issue is that LLMs don’t get bored. We’ll be running something and Bart will go, “I’ve seen this before. I’ve done this before.” And then he says, “How can I make this new?”
The people who move culture forward are usually the high-ADD folks that we’ve tended to think either need to be medicated or all go into one line of work. They have a low threshold for boredom. And because they have this low threshold, they say, “I don’t want to do this. Do something different.” And it’s almost just to keep themselves awake. But what a great gift for creativity.
Goldberg: The three of you represent the acting side, and directing, and writing. Who’s in the most existential danger here from AI?
Downey: Anyone but me.
Akhtar: The Screen Actors Guild has dealt with the image-likeness issue in a meaningful way.
[The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was the labor union which represented film and television performers in the United States. In 2012, SAG merged with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) to create SAG-AFTRA, which represents approximately 160,000 media professionals in various fields in the U.S. In solidarity with the Writers Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA launched a strike in 2023 precipitated in part by new technologies like AI and digital recreation. See ROT posts “2023 Writers Guild Strike” and “‘The Actors' Strike Dims a Bright Spot For New York City,’” referenced in the afterword to this post.]
Downey: We’ve made the most noise—we, SAG—and we’re the most dramatic about everything. I remember when I was doing Chaplin [1992; produced by Carolco Pictures; distributed by TriStar Pictures; Downey portrayed Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)], the talk was about how significant the end of the silent era was.
Goldberg: Is this the same level of disruption?
Downey: I doubt it, but not because Claude can’t currently pin his ass with both hands. There are versions that are going to be significantly more advanced. But technologies that people have argued would impede art and culture [see several of the posts referenced in the afterword] have often assisted and enhanced. So is this time different? That’s what we’re always worrying about. I live in California, always wondering, Is that little rumble in the kitchen, is this the big one?
Sher: For me, I think directing is very plastic. It requires integrating a lot of different levels of activity. So actually finding a way to process that into a computer’s thinking, and actually having it work in three dimensions in terms of organizing and developing, seems very difficult to me. And I essentially do the work of the interpreter and synthesizer.
A machine can tell you what to do, but it can’t interact and connect and pull together the different strands.
Akhtar: There’s a leadership dimension to what Bart does. I mean, you wouldn’t want a computer doing that.
Sher: This could sound geeky, but what is the distinguishing quality of making art? It is to participate in something uniquely human, something that can’t be done any other way.
So if the Greeks are gathering on the hillside because they are building a space where they can hear their stories and participate in them, that’s a uniquely human experience.
Akhtar: I do think that there is something irreducibly human about the theater, and that probably over time, it is going to continue to demonstrate its value in a world where virtuality is increasingly the norm. The economic problem for the theater has been that it happens only here and only now. So it’s always been hard to monetize.
Goldberg: But I have two words for you: ABBA Voyage. I mean, it’s an extraordinarily popular show that uses CGI [computer-generated imagery] and motion capture to give the experience of liveness without ABBA actually being there. Not precisely theater, but it is scalable, seemingly live technology.
[ABBA Voyage is a virtual concert residency by the Swedish pop group which débuted in 2022 and is currently scheduled to run through 2026. It depicts the group as they appeared in 1979 using vocals re-recorded for this show by the group in a studio, accompanied by a live band on stage.]
Downey: Strangely, this is the real trifecta: IP, technology, and taste. I think of this brand of music—which, you know, it’s not my bag, but I still really admired that somebody was passionate about that and then purpose-built the venue. And then they said, “We’re not going to go for ‘Oh my God, that looks so real.’ We’re actually going to go for a more two-dimensional effect that is rendered in a way in which the audience can complete it themselves.”
[‘IP’ is an abbreviation for so many different phrases, several of which are potentially applicable here, that I cannot interpret its use here definitively. The best known use is for ‘Internet Protocol’ (the set of rules governing the format of data sent via the internet, as in ‘IP address’), but my best guess is that Downey means ‘intellectual property.’]
Akhtar: ABBA Voyage is an exception. But it’s still not live theater.
Sher: It’s also not possible without the ABBA experience that preceded it. It’s an augmentation; it’s not original.
Goldberg: In terms of writing, Ayad, I did what you suggested I do and asked Claude to critique its own writing, and it was actually pretty good at that. I felt like I was actually talking with someone. We were in a dialogue about pacing, clarity, word choice.
Sher: But it has no intuition at all, no intuition for Ayad’s mindset in the middle of this activity, and no understanding of how he’s seeing it.
Downey: It does have context, and context is critical. I think it’s going to start quickly modeling all of those things that we hold dear as subtleties that are unassailable. It’s going to see what’s missing in its sequence, and it’s going to focus all of its cloud-bursting energy on that.
Goldberg: It might be the producers or the studios who are in trouble, because the notes are delivered sequentially, logically, and without defensiveness. Do you think that these technologies can give better notes than the average executive?
Akhtar: I know producers in Hollywood who are already using these tools for their writers. And they’re using them empirically, saying, “This is what I think. Let’s see what the AI thinks.” And it turns out that the AI is actually pretty good at understanding certain forms. If you’ve got a corpus of texts—like, say, Law & Order [television crime drama on NBC-TV, 1990-2010; 2022-Present] ; you’ve got many, many seasons of that, or you’ve got many seasons of a children’s show—those are codified forms. And the AI, if it has all those texts, can understand how words are shaped in that form.
Goldberg: So you could upload a thousand Law & Order scripts and Claude could come up with the thousandth and first.
Akhtar: About a year and a half ago, when I started playing with ChatGPT, the first thing that I started to see were processes of language that reminded me of reading Shakespeare. No writer is better at presenting context than Shakespeare. What I mean by that is Shakespeare sets everything quickly in motion. It’s almost like a chess game—you’ve got pieces, and you want to get them out as quickly as possible so you have options. Shakespeare sets the options out quickly and starts creating variations. So there is a series of words or linguistic tropes for every single play, every poem cycle, every sonnet. They all have their universe of linguistic context that is being deployed and redeployed and redeployed. And it is in that play of language that you find an accretion of meaning. It was not quite as thrilling to see the chatbot [computer program designed to respond with conversational or informational replies to verbal or written messages] do it, but it was actually very interesting to recognize the same process.
Goldberg: Shakespeare was his own AI.
Downey: Because he performed as a younger man, it was all uploaded into Shakespeare’s system. So he was so familiar with the template, and he had all this experience. And similarly, all of these LLMs are in this stage where they are just beginning to be taken seriously. It’s like we’re pre-bar mitzvah, but these are sharp kids.
[For readers who aren’t students of theater history, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an established actor from about 1585, years before he wrote his first play. Some of this is discussed in “Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist” by Kirk Woodward (2 and 5 March 2025).
[The bar mitzvah is the Jewish religious ceremony to admit a boy of 13 to the community as an adult member; the girls’ ceremony, at 12 or 13, is called a bat mitzvah. (Downey described himself in a 2004 New York Times interview as a “Jewish-Buddhist.”)]
Goldberg: Would you use ChatGPT to write an entire piece?
Sher: Soon we’ll be having conversations about whether Claude is a better artist than ChatGPT. Could you imagine people saying, “Well, I’m not going to see that play, because it was written by this machine; I want to see this one, because it’s written by Gemini [chatbot developed in 2023 by Google] instead.”
Goldberg: Unfortunately, I can easily imagine it.
Akhtar: I’m not sure that I would use an LLM to write a play, because they’re just not very good at doing that yet, as you discovered in your own play by Claude. I don’t think they’re good enough to be making the kinds of decisions that go into making a work of art.
Goldberg: But you’re teaching the tool how to get better.
Akhtar: So what? They’ve already gone to school on my body of work.
[Read: The authors whose pirated books are powering generative AI]
Goldberg: So what? So what? Six hundred years of [Johannes] Gutenberg [German; ca. 1393-1406 – 1468], and the printing press [ca. 1440] never made decisions on its own.
Akhtar: But we’re already within this regime where power and monetized scale exist within the hands of very few. We’re doing it every day with our phones; you’re teaching the machine everything about you and your family and your desires. This is the paradigm for the 21st century. All human activity is passing through the hands of very few people and a lot of machines.
Goldberg: McNeal is about lack of control.
Akhtar: It is. I’m just making the point that we’re not really in a different regime of power with AI. It may be even more concentrated and even more consequential, but at the end of the day, to participate in the public space in the 21st century is to participate in this structure. That’s just what it is. We don’t have an alternative, because our government has not regulated this.
Goldberg: You see the LLM as a collaborator in some ways. Where will the red line be for writers, between collaboration and plagiarism?
Akhtar: From my perspective, there are any number of artists we could look at, but the one that I would probably always spend the most time looking at is Shakespeare, and it’s tough to say that he wasn’t copying. As McNeal explains at one point in the play, King Lear shares 70 percent of its words with a previous play called King Leir, which Shakespeare knew well and used to write Lear. And it’s not just Leir. There’s that great scene in Lear where Gloucester is led to this plain and told it’s a cliff over which he’s going to jump, and that subplot is taken right out of Sir Philip Sidney [English poet, courtier, scholar, and soldier; 1554-86]. It may reflect deeper processes of cognition. It may reflect, as Bart has said, how we imitate in order to learn. All of that is just part of what we do. When that gets married to a corporate-ownership model, that is a separate issue, something that will have to get worked out over time, socially and legally. Or not, if our legislators don’t have the will to do so.
[Records show that The moste famous Chronicle historye of Leire king of England and his Three Daughters, an anonymous Elizabethan play, was performed on 6 and 8 April 1594 by a cast that combined personnel from Queen Elizabeth’s Men and Sussex’s Men. Shakespeare, who might have been a player in the Queen's company, may have performed in King Leir. Shakespeare’s King Lear is thought to have been composed sometime between 1603 and 1606. The above scene in King Lear [Act 4, Scene 6] is a direct adaptation of a plot device from Sidney’s 1593 novel The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia]
Goldberg: The final soliloquy of the play—no spoilers here—is augmented by AI.
Akhtar: This has really been a fascinating collaboration. Because I wanted some part of the play to actually be meaningfully generated by ChatGPT or some large language model—Gemini, Claude. I tried them all. And I wanted to do it because it was part of what the play was about. But the LLMs had a tough time actually delivering the goods until this week. I’ve finally had some experiences now, after many months of working with them, that are bearing fruit.
I wanted the final speech to have a quality of magic to it that resembles the kind of amazement that I knew you had felt working with the model, and that I have sometimes felt when I see the language being generated. I want the audience to have that experience.
Sher: You know, I think the problem you were facing could have been with any of your collaborators. We just had this new collaborator to help with that moment.
Goldberg: You’re blowing my mind.
Akhtar: It’s not really that controversial.
Goldberg: Yes it is. It’s totally controversial.
Downey: Well, let’s find out!
Goldberg: It’s more of a leap than you guys think.
Akhtar: It’s a play about AI. It stands to reason that I was able, over the course of many months, to finally get the AI to give me something that I could use in the play.
Downey: You know what the leap was like? A colicky little baby finally gave us a big ol’ burp.
Akhtar: That’s exactly right. That’s what happened. A lot of unsatisfying work, and then, unprompted, it finally came up with a brilliant final couplet! And that’s what I’m using for the end of the play’s final speech.
Goldberg: Amazing, and threatening.
Sher: I just can’t imagine a world in which ChatGPT could take all experience and unify it with Ayad’s interest in beauty and meaning and his obsession with classical tragedy and pull all those forces together with emotion and feeling. Because no matter how many times you prompted it, you’re still going to get The Pestilential Plagiarist, or whatever it’s called.
Downey: The reason that we’re all sitting here right now is because this motherfucker, Ayad, is so searingly sophisticated, but also on occasion—more than occasionally—hot under the collar. My new favorite cable channel is called Ayad Has Fucking Had It. He’s like the most collaborative superintelligence you will ever come across, and therefore he’s letting all this slack out to everyone around him, but once in a while, if this intelligence is entirely unappreciated for hours or days at a time, he will flare. He’ll just remind us that he can break the sound barrier if he wants to. And I get chills from that. And that’s why we’re here. It’s the human thing.
Akhtar: It’s not new for humans to use tools.
Sher: Are we going to be required to upload a system of ethics into the machines as they get more and more powerful?
Downey: Too late.
Goldberg: That’s what they promise in Silicon Valley, alignment with human values.
Downey: Two years ago was the time to do something.
Akhtar: You guys are thinking big. But I just don’t know how this is going to play out. I don’t know what it is. I’m just interested in what I’m experiencing now and in working with the technology. What’s the experience I’m having now?
Goldberg: There’s a difference between a human hack and an excellent human writer. The human hack doesn’t know that they’re bad.
Downey: This is a harebrained rabbit hole where we could constantly keep thinking of more and more ramifications. Another issue here is that certain great artists do something that most people would labor an entire life or career to come close to, and the second they’re done with it, they have contempt for it, because they go, “Eh, that’s not my best.”
Akhtar: I recognize someone in that.
Downey: All I’m saying is that I just want the feeling of those sparks flying, that new neural pathway being forced. I want to push the limits. It’s that whole thing of pushing limits. When I feel good, when I can tell Bart is kicking me, when Ayad is just lighting up, and when I’m realizing that I just got a note that revolutionized the way I’m going to try to portray something, you go, “Ooh!” And even if it’s old news to someone else, for me, it’s revolutionary.
Akhtar: Another way of putting this, what Robert is saying, is that what he’s engaged in is not problem-solving, per se. It’s not that there’s an identified problem that he is trying to solve. This is how a computer is often thinking, with a gamification sort of mindset. For Robert, there’s a richness of the present for him as he’s working that is identifying possibilities, not problems.
Sher: I’ve thought a lot about this, trying to understand the issue of GPT [‘generative pre-trained transformer’ (GPT) is a type of LLM and a framework for generative artificial intelligence] and creativity, and I’m a lot less worried now, because I feel that the depth of the artistic process in the theater isn’t replicable.
The amalgam of human experience and emotion and feeling that passes through artists is uniquely human and not capturable. Word orders can be taken from all kinds of sources. They can be imitated; they can be replicated; they can be reproduced in different ways. But the essential activity of what we do here in this way, and what we build, has never been safer.
Downey: And
if our job is to hold the mirror up to nature, this is now part of nature. It
is now part of the firmament. Nature is now inclusive of this. We’re onstage
and we’re reflecting this back to you. What do you see? Do you see yourself
within this picture?
[The theater website Broadway World did a “Review Roundup” of McNeal and, based on 20 notices, it calculated an average rating of 41%. Of the 20 reviews samples, 2 were positive (˄ – 10%), 5 were mediocre (˃ – 25%), and 13 were negative (˅ – 65%). Here’s a selection of the excerpts BWW posted in the roundup:
˅ Jesse Green, New York Times: I’m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.
˃ Charles Isherwood, Wall Street Journal: “McNeal,” directed by Lincoln Center Theater’s newly named executive producer Bartlett Sher, is itself a confused and discursive if thought-provoking drama that often seems a grab bag of ideas Mr. Akhtar delves into without finding much depth.
˅ Aramide Timubu, Variety: “McNeal” falters because it doesn’t know what it wants to say. Moreover, the narrative felt confusing and meaningless, with a mix of genres and no actual theme or climax. Jacob is a writer, but viewers can never penetrate who he is beyond the surface. Instead, the play becomes an illustration of a self-absorbed man who treats the people around him like accessories for his own gain.
˃ Jeremy Gerard, Deadline: With much 21st Century razzle dazzle provided by the magnificent video projection designs of Jake Barton and huge digital composite images – video AI projections of faces of the actors meld into one another at one point – from AGBO, McNeal, astutely directed by the great Bartlett Sher, is an often confusing though wheedlingly emotional mindgame. The discombobulation is, one suspects, Akhtar’s intention, a way of presenting on a physical stage a near-future realm of thorny, magic-seeming complexity in which thousands of years of data – from Shakespeare and Ibsen to your dead wife’s old notebooks, and everything in between – can be melded into a book with your name on it, and in relative minutes. Is this theft, or merely a literary Moog waiting for its Brian Eno?
˅ Johnny Oleksinki, New York Post: Should your sole aim be to watch the Marvel and “Oppenheimer” actor, who’s making his Broadway debut, give a capable performance in his signature Tony Stark staccato, mission accomplished. However, it is, well, a marvel how even the most blinding star power can dim when blacked out by a mind-numbing plot, mouthpiece supporting characters and a Universal Studios-scale set of giant screens that’s an expensive apology for the actual play.
˅ Jackson McHenry, Vulture/New York: McNeal’s woozy ruminations about art and technology might strike with more force if the actual drama around them had more tensile strength. The human dynamics Akhtar and Sher hang all of this on never get past cliché: McNeal confronts a cadre of women, including Martin’s assistant (Saisha Talwar), a horrifyingly underprepared magazine journalist (Brittany Bellizeare), and a former New York Times books editor who is pretty obviously based on Pamela Paul (Melora Hardin). In his exchanges with them, they get to do little except absorb his rants about everything from the work of Annie Ernaux to Harvey Weinstein. If McNeal wants to tell us that a great artist — specifically a great man, in this case — is some unique force in the universe, it requires a more finely crafted rendering of that man. But on the opposite end, if the play wants to suggest AI could offer an alternative to that figure that’s equal in stature? Well, there’s an issue of rendering there, too.
˃ Emlyn Travis, Entertainment Weekly: McNeal might ask fascinating questions about a writer’s sense of integrity, the disconnect between generations of writers, and the limits of artificial intelligence within art, but the delivery is so garbled that it is difficult to ascertain what the play is actually trying to say about these complex issues… if anything at all. Grade: C+
˄ Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: Star power is not to be underestimated. Not only can it bring in audiences who may not normally attend new Broadway plays, it can also infuse a problematic work with a gravitas it might not normally possess. Such is the case with Lincoln Center Theater’s production of the new drama by Ayad Akhtar (Disgraced, The Invisible Hand) that touches on such themes as artificial intelligence, plagiarism, and writerly inspiration without really coming to grips with any of them. But it doesn’t matter, thanks to the presence of Robert Downey Jr. in the title role. Downey, who recently won an Oscar for the film Oppenheimer and is here making his stage debut, brings such charisma and magnetism to McNeal that it’s easy to overlook the play’s flaws.
˄ Roma Torre, New York Stage Review: Before I get into the merits of the play and Lincoln Center’s thrilling production, something else that’s very real is the extraordinary talents of its leading man. Making his Broadway debut, Robert Downey Jr., who most of us know only through his film work, is a great stage actor. As famed novelist Jacob McNeal, an egotistical, self-acknowledged asshole, he is a fascinating creature treading the line between obnoxious and seductive. You can’t take your eyes off him . . . and happily, he’s on stage for the entirety of Akhtar’s 90-minute drama.
˃ Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Theatre Guide: In Ayad Akhtar’s crisply staged yet dramatically muddy play, McNeal, Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. summons every ounce of his innate swagger and smugness as a misogynistic author who’s just found himself the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Broadway debut, Downey steps up; he’s sure-footed and magnetic. The play itself, less so.
[I have published (or republished) several articles concerning computers or artificial intelligence and theater or the arts in general. They aren’t all relevant to “The Playwright in the Age of AI,” but they all do relate to the same basic phenomenon. For that reason, I’m appending a list of those ROT posts for your reference:
• “Theater and Computers” (5 December 2009)
• “Computers and Actors” (4 and 7 October 2021)
[Jeffrey Goldberg (b. 1965) is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week With The Atlantic on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).]
